Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has reiterated, this time in more assertive terms, that he is in a mood to deal, ESPN Dallas reported.

"We're letting everybody know that the ‘Bank of Cuban’ is open," he said Monday night, a couple of days after declaring that there was a "100 percent chance" the Mavs would aggressively pursue trade opportunities before the Feb. 21 deadline.

“If it's the right deal, we don't mind taking back money,” said Cuban, whose team in danger of seeing its 12-year playoff streak snapped. “But we're not going to do a trade just to do a trade. It's got to be worthwhile.”

The Mavs, 16-23 and in 12th place in the Western Conference, are under the league’s salary cap, giving them the ability to take on large contracts in trades.

The team chose not to re-sign several key contributors to the Mavs’ 2011 championship team, not just to clear cap space to sign a superstar in free agency last offseason, but also, as Cuban has frequently insisted, for payroll flexibility during this season.

That leaves the trade market as the primary way the team can make a major roster upgrade.

And Cuban has made it clear that he intends to explore every trade possibility, although he has said he won't trade star Dirk Nowitzki, the team's best player. Instead, Cuban says he is poring over rosters and making suggestions to Mavs president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson on a daily basis.

"That's obviously good to know that he still wants to go for it," said Nowitzki, noting that the Mavs typically have been one of the teams hit hardest by the luxury tax. "That's obviously what he promised me when I re-signed here in 2010. I wanted to make sure that he still wanted to go for it and keep spending and using his resources to make sure this was a winning franchise, and obviously then we didn't know that the next year we were going to win it all.

"That just happened and it was a great byproduct, but our plan was to be a winning team the four years that I signed on, so we'll see what happens."

The Mavs have made many trades during Cuban's 13-year ownership, during which time the team took on significantly more salary.

However, under the new, more restrictive collective bargaining agreement, the Mavs wouldn't have the flexibility to make those types of trades as a luxury-tax-paying team. Cuban, according to ESPN Dallas, is hoping to take advantage of teams that want to avoid paying the luxury tax, which increases drastically next season.

The Mavs have several expiring contracts that could be attractive to cost-cutting teams and will seek to get involved as facilitators in multi-team trades as well as discussing traditional deals.